Welf. & Inst. Code, § 14011.9

(a) On or before October 1, 2002, the department shall issue instructions to counties via an all-county letter or similar instructions to establish an automated system for tracking the status of applications received by county welfare departments from the centralized processing entity that accepts and screens applications for benefits under the Medi-Cal program for the purpose of forwarding these applications to the appropriate counties. Except for reporting denials of applications on behalf of children enrolled in accelerated Medi-Cal coverage pursuant to subdivision (g) of Section 14011.6, the department shall not institute a process to require county welfare departments to routinely manually report to the Medi-Cal Eligibility Data System (MEDS) regarding the status of applications for Medi-Cal coverage prior to the development of an interface between that county’s automated eligibility determination system and the MEDS system for the purposes of implementing this section. It is the intent of the Legislature that the Health Human Services Data Center and the counties complete the automation changes necessary to implement the automated tracking system on or before July 1, 2003.

(b) This section shall be implemented only to the extent that federal financial participation is not jeopardized.

(c) Nothing in this section shall be construed as prohibiting the department from requiring a county to report on the status of an individual application or to manually generate a report on a statistically valid sampling of applications pursuant to federally required monitoring activities.